FORMS OF PUBLIC SOCIALITY IN TWENTIETH CENTURY URBAN GREECE: ASSOCIATIONS, NETWORKS OF SOCIAL INTERVENTION AND COLLECTIVE SUBJECTIVITIES

The proposed project investigates forms of public sociality in different urban centres during the twentieth century. It focuses on formal voluntary associations but research will also include informal ones, such as networks of social intervention and collective subjectivities. Through multidisciplinary approaches centred on the common concept of public sociality, the aim is to identify forms of pubic action, the ways they construct political identities and collective subjectivities, their transformations over time and their political effects.

The project comprises three Research Teams (RT). Each focuses on a different theme of the common conceptual framework. Furthermore, all RTs participate in common actions. More specifically:

RT1 examines associations and collective actions that focus on ‘young people’ and ‘youth’ in different aspects of life (education, professional apprenticeship, welfare, management of mental health and/or ‘antisocial behaviour’, collective demands, etc.). These associations and collective activities either address the young or are organised by them.

RT2 explores the social action of voluntary groupings, as reported in the daily press of Athens and Thessaloniki over the years 1974-1981, i.e. the period after the fall of the dictatorship (1967-1974). The objective is to examine political and social dimensions of ‘civil society’, its possible transformations in the period under consideration and the degree of political appeal of public interventions.

RT3 studies collective subjectivities focusing on regional identity, space of intervention – either a neighbourhood or a region – or the managing of memory.

The common actions of the three RTs include: - an integrated research information system with two databases, one bibliographical and one on the voluntary associations under study; - a standing rotating research seminar of the three RTs; - workshops synthesising the research results.

Each RT organises the research for its specific case studies around the same actions: the researchers locate the bibliographical and archival sources, gather and process the data, and, finally, complete their analysis and write up the conclusions. The research results of the individual case studies are presented twice a year in the common seminar of the RTs. This allows for elaborating the relationship between the individual case studies and the conceptual framework of the project, and the horizontal and vertical affinities between them. Moreover, all researchers contribute to the common databases.

This structure aims at facilitating comparisons and syntheses. Researchers in the three RTs are historians, historical anthropologists and political scientists. They have various affiliations: the University of Crete, the University of the Aegean, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, as well as the Democritus University of Thrace, the National Hellenic Research Foundation, Brown University, USA and Boğaziçi University, Turkey. They include a significant number of young researchers